Jack Strocchi points me to this interesting piece by Michael Duffy, comparing the case of Chinese diplomat and would-be defector Chen Yonglin with the horrific treatment meted out by a series of immigration ministers to Peter Qasim, to whom could be added equally outrageous cases like those of Al-Kateb and Al Khafaji sentenced to indefinite detention because no country will take them, not to mention the many innocent children locked behind barbed wire.
Duffy, says correctly that Chen is a queue-jumper[1] and that the government’s position[2] is inconsistent with the tough stand it took on refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan. He says
This tide of toughness has lifted the ship of conservative government to ever new levels of success. Refugees have been locked up to deter others overseas, and the voters have given their thanks. The careers of people like Costello and Abbott have blossomed and rightly so, because they are strong men prepared to stand behind the beliefs they hold so passionately.
So he says, Chen and his family should be locked up with all the others.
I agree with Duffy that the inconsistencies are glaring, but not on how to resolve them. We should give Chen asylum and end mandatory detention immediately.
Of course, there’s a big problem here for refugee policy. As Duffy says, Chen brought his exposure to political persecution on himself by denouncing the Chinese government. But, of course this is commonly the case with refugees. Except during (sadly too common) outbreaks of genocidal madness like the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges, the subjects of dictatorships are usually safe enough if they keep quiet. That’s why we used to use the category of territorial asylum, which, as I understand it, said that anyone who could get out of, say, the Soviet Union, automatically counted as a refugee.
But if we allowed anyone from China who denounced the government to seek asylum here, there could well be quite a lot of applicants. I don’t have an immediate answer to this other than to say that it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t get too cosy with the current Chinese government. They may like capitalism now, but its still a communist dictatorship they’re running.
A final point: Duffy coins the neologism “neocoms”, and offers the following explanation (which I missed in the original version of this post)
What a sudden about-face, what a strange and unexpected burst of compassion from tough politicians and commentators who have supported mandatory detention for so long. It needs a name, and I suggest we call it the new compassion, and those who express it the neo-coms.
To any who recognise themselves in this description, I can only say, “Welcome back to humanity”.
fn1. That is, if you accept the bogus claim that there exists a queue, and that potential refugees are in a position to take their place at the back of it
fn2. As far as it can be discerned among a fog of evasions
Update In comments, Andrew Bartlett suggested that Duffy was writing ironically. That was my first reading also, and seems to have been the impression of others. But the text is clear enough, and Duffy has consistently supported a hard line on asylum-seekers. As I’ve discovered before now, irony is a dangerous weapon. Still if Duffy has turned against mandatory detention in general, I’ll be happy to congratulate him.
John Quiggin 
Well, actually he explains it in his piece. It’s short for those (on the right?) he describes as displaying ‘new compassion’. Actually, I think Chen’s case is quite different from that of other refugees as he’ll be useful to the Australian govt intelligence community.
Quite right, Doug. I’ll correct the post.
I would have thought the government would have a separate process for high-profile asylum seekers such as embassy defectors.
If I was the Chinese govt I would be laughing my head off at the Australian govt: I mean bending over backwards like this not to offend over asylum seekers them just hands them a stronger negotiating position on trade.
They should be saying “Look China, he’s your guy and he wants to leave – that’s your problem not ours. Domestically, we have no choice but to look after him – its our law and it is politically sensitive.” Instead we get this namby-pamby handwringing which is only going to serve to make China think: “if the aussies are this soft when it comes to refugees, we should be able to really shaft them on trade”
Chen, I presume, entered the country legally with a visa which may still be valid. The boat people didn’t.
Newsflash hermit: Not everyone in detention centres arrived by boat.
I think Duffy has every justification to be concerned….
First we have the DIMIA softenings post Rau, the false Filipino, Qasim, stateles kids and so-on.
Then we have the “halfway” speech by Howard being seriously considered by indigenous leaders other than the usual suspects. This is despite the inept attempt at yet another DIMIA stuff up by Vanstone in gazumping Lowitja for a quick wham, bam and now I have to get back to cabinet to discuss more important issues like refugees, and rats in the ranks.
Then we have Chen.
Howard never was a principled racist. The race card was played for pure political purposes. The fact that there is a wetness seeping upwards through the Libs from Georgiou to the rest of the “magnificent 7” (thanks Alan Ramsay) and now to Costello and Co probably means Howard smells some votes from middle Australia in a more compassionate spin and hopefully a decline in uncomplicated Hansonism, not to mention outflanking Labor by a quick left sidestep.
Neo-cons should be concerned that neo-coms seem to be getting a hearing without overt disciplinary action.
On the other side, just how quickly can Labor move to avoid being overexposed on the right ?
The rest of us can just hope that the consensus policy settings to emerge will be such that we can start admitting to be Australian, after all.
I don’t think the Australian government is that stupid. You don’t want to do things which will precipitate a demonstration in China against Australia, thereby hampering trade negotiations for both parties.
I think your statement that “Duffy says correctly that Chen is a queue-jumper” is wrong. (It’s not wrong that Duffy said it, but wrong to say it is correct). Using the term ‘queue-jumper’ in regard to asylum seekers reinforces a false premise that the Govt is keen to keep alive, but it is particularly wrong in Mr Chen’s case.
Assuming what Mr Chen says is genuine – and I find it hard to see how anyone could suggest that his claim should not at least be taken at face value – then there is no “queue” for someone like him (or his wife and 6 year old daughter). Is he supposed to go to some refugee camp in Africa or wait without any security somewhere like Indonesia to wait his ‘turn’? There sure isn’t one he can wait in safely inside China and again there is no ‘queue’ there even if he could. Our offshore refugee and humanitarian program does not operate just on the basis of selecting who has been waiting the longest (or even who is assessed as the most needy) so when would his ‘turn’ in the ‘queue’ ever come up anyway?
People who seek asylum onshore should not be confused with people Australia selects through its offshore refugee and humanitarian program – indeed these two groups were rightly kept separate until after Mr Ruddock became Minister, when he took the number of successful onshore claims off the total Aust selects from overseas each year to enable him to give a veneer of credibility to this totally misleading term. Mr Chen’s case is a perfect example of how iniquitous this language and this policy is – by (at least allegedly) trying to protect his family from persecution, he can br (and is) portrayed as “stealing” the places of people in refugee camps in Africa by ‘jumping the queue’ – as though somehow he should just go back to China and take his imprisonment and ‘re-education’ and stop being selfish.
I found Duffy’s piece a bit hard to comprehend as I couldn’t figure if (and when) he was being sarcastic. He certainly did a more coherent job than Andrew Bolt’s recent piece which desparately tried to maintain some logic defending the Govt’s indefensible laws whilst reluctantly recognising that they are causing injustices. As is usually the case when his argument is poor, Bolt tries to cover it up by abusing and vilifying his political opponents (actually now that I think of it, he does that in almost every article). Michael Duffy is way above him in rational debate (and hence no doubt sells fewer newspapers as a consequence)
Andrew is spot on about the difficulty in comprehending Duffy’s tone. It sounds ironic, but he doesn’t seem to be actually sending anyone up. At the end of the day it seems his statements are to be taken at face value: Chen has brought this all on himself, and to protect him would be weak and inconsistent. What he doesn’t mention is that the rebutal of Chen is completely consistent with the Government’s history of acquiescence to China, as seen in the removal of protesters from Parliament in 2003 and Howard’s refusal ti meet the Dalai Lama.
Hooray for the Democrats and Greens on this issue.
As a signatory of the 1951 Convention on Refugees, Australia may not return an applicant for political asylum to his/her nation of origin.
According to international law, a refugee is a person put in fear of persecution by his/her national government, who is outside his/her country of nationality or habitual residence, that is, crossed one and one only international border. This seems to describe Mr Chen very well.
Thus Mr Chen, by virtue of the fact that he has crossed one and one only international border, is in quite a different category from most of the detainees languishing in various hell-holes around and within Australia.
And DFAT knew how embarrassing the Chen case would be, as evidenced by its extreme reluctance even to acknowledge the existence of Mr Chen’s plea for political asylum. DFAT has no such difficulty with the Qasims of this world, precisely because, under the pettifogging reading of the 1951 Convention, those latter don’t qualify as valid applicaants for political asylum.
Mr Chen forces the government to make a choice between expediency and even its grotesquely stunted version of the rule of law.
No prizes for guessing which will win.
Newsflash 2 for Hermit:
Refugees have an absolute legal right to seek refuge in any country.
This is recognised in international treaties to which Australia is a signatory. Upon ratification by the Senate, a treaty has the same legal force as any other Australian law.
The majority of the asylum-seekers from The Tampa were eventually granted refugee status – meaning they did nothing illegal in seeking to enter Australia.
50% or more of the “illegal immigrants” held in detention also entered the country legally. Probably the largest groups of people illegally in Australia are US and British tourists overstaying their visas and/or working while on tourist visas and students, primarily East Asian, violating the terms of their visas by working.
To add to my last: if people think the current laws allowing refugees to enter Australia are too generous, then they should lobby the Australian government to get it to abrogate the treaty in question or to seek changes to it, rather than supporting their efforts to undermine the rule of law and due process.
However before doing so, they might want to reflect that those laws were drafted in response to events leading up to and during World War II when hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking asylum were denied entry by Allied and neutral countries.
They might also like to stop and consider the fact that a substantial porportion of the Australian population are descended from refugees.
Looks like Australia won’t be getting illegal immigrants; from now on they will tend to be ‘refugees’. I suggest a change in the rules, that an asylum seeker has to seek asylum in the first non-despotic country in which they find themselves. In other words if you are a ‘refugee’ you don’t get to pick and choose a destination several countries away.
Why do you put inverted commas around refugees, hermit? Are you implying that people found to be refugees and given refuge in Australia aren’t actually refugees but are really ‘refugees’? Or is it that people fleeing torture, persecution etc etc etc aren’t really refugees but ‘refugees’? Is there some definition of refugee that sorts out the refugees from the ‘refugees’?
And do you think that refugees should be able “to pick and choose a destination”, unlike ‘refugees’?
Ian : I hate to be a pedant, and I agree totally with the thrust of what your saying but there’s a few factual errors in some of the things you say.
Firstly, whilst “Refugees have an absolute legal right to seek refuge in any country”, those countries do not have an absolute legal requirement to provide it and can also qualify it in all sorts of ways – it depends what is in their laws.
Treaties do not get “ratified by the Senate” in Australia – a Committee gets to look at them and pass an opinion, but the Govt can sign and/or ratify them regardless. Even then they do not have “the same legal force as any other Australian law”. They can influence Court interpretations of the law, but unless they are specifically incorporated in Australian law, then they do not have direct legal weight. The definition of refugee under the Refugee Convention is incorporated in the Migration Act, (unlike the definitions under the Convention Against Torture for example), although the Act still surrounds it with other qualifications.
One of these qualifications goes to the sort of thing Hermit is talking about – there is basically a ‘prior opportunity’ section under the law which says (paraphrasing) is you ‘resided’ (very loosely defined) in another country where you could have sought asylum, then that can affect your refugee claim here.
The biggest problem with criteria like Hermit suggests is that a country may be ‘non-despotic’ and may even ‘tolerate’ your presence, but unless it gives you enforceable protection under their laws from being sent back to the place you are at risk (or to another place where the same risk applies) then it is not genuine protection – it can disappear at any time. This problematic interpretation already exists under Australian law in some cases. I don’t recommended worsening/weakening this lack of protection even further.
Considering the USA and other countries can and do kidnap people from yet other countries, what sort of meaningful protection can a different legal status provide in australia than in another country where the protection is provided by means of government action? The latter sounds far more effective to me. Would Vanunu have been better off in 1980s Paraguay or Italy?
Andrew,
Thank you for the corrections. I was obviously confusing the Australian and American systems for ratifying treaties.
I will confess to a certain bias here – following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, two of my great-grandparents fled Alsace-Lorraine for England (and subsequently Australia.) As Jews, had they remained in Alsace-Lorraine, their descendants would probably have been killed during the Holocaust.
I believe that persons claiming ot be refugeees should, at them inimal enjoy at least the same presumption of innocence as the accused in criminal trials.
I am concerned that setting preconditions such as “prior opportunity” however reasoanble they may appear in some circumstances may, in other circumstances put people’s lives at risk.
I for one am prepared to accept a certain number of questionable asylum claims rather than put lives at risk.
Ian – I think you make a key point which proponents on all sides should acknowledge. There will inevitably be a few ‘undeserving’ cases get through the system, but that should be something we ar prepared to accept, as the only alternative is to restrict it so tightly that you run the real risk of some very ‘deserving’ cases being excluded.
When the consequence of a deserving case being excluded is potentially death or torture, I think having a few undeserving people get through is a very small price to pay. There is a serious and growing body of evidence that suggests Australia has already got the balance so wrong that we have deported genuine refugees to danger and disappearance (if not death). Tightening things further will only make that worse.
When one thinks of the old maxim that it’s better to have 100 guilty people go free than 1 innocent person be jailed, our migration system with its 100s of unconvicted people jailed just to ‘send a message’ starts to look prety sick – let along deporting them to danger.
When one thinks of the old maxim that it’s better to have 100 guilty people go free than 1 innocent person be jailed, our migration system with its 100s of unconvicted people jailed just to ‘send a message’ starts to look prety sick – let along deporting them to danger.
Hear hear.
Of course the ‘message’ is not intended for potential refugees in their country of origin, but for the Hansonites in this country. I doubt there will be any real policy change while that voter base includes substantial portions of both Labour and Liberal supporters.
Has anyone put together a “who’s who” of “great Australians” that originally arrived here fleeing persecution?
“Has anyone put together a “who’s whoâ€? of “great Australiansâ€? that originally arrived here fleeing persecution?”
The Dunera Boys alone included “composer Felix Werder, actor Max Bruch, political scientists Henry Mayer and Hugo Wolf, athletics trainer Franz Stampfl, anthropologist Leonhard Adam, artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mac, who’d taught at the Bauhaus, economist Fred Greun, art historian Franz Philipp, film-maker Kurt Sternburg, physicist Hans Kronenburger, judge Stephen Strauss and mathematician Felix Behrend.”
Gruen was the only one of these I knew. He was one of Australia’s finest economists.
The reference to the atrocious treatment of Jewish refugees is instructive. We keep talking about racism driving all this, but I always end up thinking that religion is a powerful undercurrent. These days, this society does not like Muslims.
The current low level but vicious persecutory reflex has been overwhelmed at various times by larger scale catastrophes. The DP camps of Europe, the Vietnamese boat people. If I was a policy maker in any of the major political parties, I would be working through the implications of a Shi-ite Iraq.
Did anyone else notice the recent press report that the departing ambassador to Australia from a European country (Germany, I think) was to retire in Australia. Good on him. Sound judgement. But I wonder which queue he jumped, or which spies he dobbed in? Why can he stay so easily when Chen is having so much trouble?
Hey, weren’t the Dunera boys merely stranded here, rather than fleeing? Or was that some other lot?
I do not think it makes much sense to ground the claims of refugees in their supply of intellectual goods to this country. It is, after all, their moral demand that counts.
The Dunera Boys and their ilk were a freakish bonanza. They were part of the Azkhenazi Jewish exodus from Central & East Europe from the mid-thirties to the mid-fifties, fleeing totalitarian tyranny. These people are in a class of their own in terms of intellectual fire power. The smart tail of the Azkhenazi Bell Curve boasts persons with 140+ IQ at about six times the Caucasian frequency.
We will never see their like again, unless people start persecuting Jews en masse again.
PML,
You have half-remembered the circumstances of the “Dunera Boys”.
They did indeed “flee persecution”. They fled from the Third Reich to Britain. Upon the outbreak of hostilities between the Third Reich and Britain, these refugees from Hitler’s persecution were declared to be enemy aliens, and interned. Thus, seeking refuge in Australia was the very last thing on their minds.
Internment of these folks was perhaps a prudent course of action of the British Government because there was no ready way to determine who was a victim of totalitarian terror and who was a fifth columnist. (You may recall that the British authorities had a similar problem sorting out the actual loyalties of Kim Philby. Philby, of course, merely rose to lead the Soviet Section of MI6.)
Meanwhile, after a rough winnowing, which did not entirely eradicate some carpet munching Nazis from their number, the less dangerous of these Hun chappies were bundled off to Hay in the Riverina of NSW.
The Australian authorities, not entirely recovered from their reflexive impulse to do what they were told by His Britannic Majesty’s Government, accepted this extraordinary cargo of talent (and their master-race-avatar fellow-travellers).
Under the slack tutelege of the Chockos (Australian Militia Forces) the Dunera Boys created a little commonwealth of reason on the wind-raked Hay Plains.
A touch-stone of contemporary relevance is that the custodial staff of our present-day gulags, and indeed the hierarchy of DIMIA, take pride not in their humane slackness, but in their managerial “briskness”.
I think the take-home message here is that if you set the right pavlovian conditions for an Aussie, and he/she can be turned into a small-minded, punitive, tiny tyrant.
The question of refugees and mandatory detention has caused some members of the Howard Government to open a new front in the War On Terror: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200506/s1392307.htm
Re claims the Ashkenazi Jews fleeing European state terror were uniquely gifted, we need look no further than the Vietnamese refugees of the 1970s-80s. I haven’t done the stats, but I’d be surprised if any other identifiable population segment has yielded more heart surgeons, musicians, scientists and graduates generally. I suspect it has more to do with class origins than culture, race or religion. The middle classes, especially when forced to flee their country, value education for their children above all else.
No, I was half remembering the Viennese Boy’s Choir stuff. But at least it’s worth remembering that there is a continuum between refugee, vagrant, and distressed traveller – all of which provide legal systems with similar conundra.
My own take on Howard’s actions/inactions is not that he has done deliberately or incidentally cruel things, but that once the first precautionary actions had been taken, there was an omission (from lack of priority) of further steps. That is, the first assumption on so-called illegals should be analogous to vagrancy and quarantine requirements – but there is no follow up in place to address what is not our duty but our charitable instincts. (There’s a dilemma here too, relating also to everything at the root of socialism: see how well it is described in the 38th article of the Church of England.)
I am off to a presentation by J. Burnside at al on this subject this evening. I may report back.
I argued in a speech I gave at the 2003 FECCA conference (sorry, can’t find it online anywhere) that refugees are in fact self selecting for traits like initiative and enterprise. Often it’s this which distinguishes them from others who don’t leave a country ruled by an oppressive and undemocratic regime. Thus to my mind it’s not at all surprising that refugees have contributed disproportionally to national culture, economic prosperity, overall wellbeing – in whatever country they have settled. It also argues that refugees are potentially the most (not least) desirable category of potential immigrants to a country – we should be welcoming them rather than trying to discourage them!
The presentation was on Habib and Hicks and their experiences and desserts, not on the refugee issue at all.